Food stylists use tricks to make food look appetizing in photographs and films. They are skilled in the aesthetic presentation of food and can use non-edible components to create the desired appearance. Stylists modify recipes and presentation for photographs, and actors are often provided with substitutes to eat on set.
Stylists make food interesting and appetizing when filmed or photographed. Many people have noticed that the food photographs they take at home look dull, listless and unappetizing, sometimes even when they have photography skills. Food is a tricky thing to photograph well, and stylists have a number of tricks up their sleeves to use when arranging and styling food for presentation.
Many food stylists have a background in culinary education, in addition to training in the arts. They must be familiar with food, but also with the demands of photography and filmmaking and the ways in which food can behave when photographed. A dish that may look delicious in real life can look awful if it’s not drawn correctly, and indeed, many of the food photographs seen in advertisements feature a surprising number of inedible ingredients.
Food stylists are skilled in the aesthetic presentation of food, creating a specific look with plating, background setting and other elements of the presentation. They are also skilled at extracting the desired appearances from the foods they work with. They can enhance color and texture with paint, makeup, and hand tools, create the illusion of dew beads or a crust of ice, and create the look of steam. Stylists are primarily concerned with aesthetics, not edibility.
A stylist can use non-edible components such as wax, wood, plastic, and so on in the course of food styling, or the edible components can be used in new ways. For example, milk can look unappetizing, so a photograph of a cookie balancing on a glass of milk might actually use a glass of heavy cream to create a fuller, richer look.
The style of the food explains why the food never comes out looking like the photo. With something like a cookbook, the stylist can try out the recipe as well as learn more about it, but usually he modifies the recipe and presentation of the food when it comes to creating a photograph of the food for use as an illustration. For example, the well-browned roast turkey used as an illustration in a Thanksgiving cookbook might in real life be raw in the middle, with a crust created with the help of a hair dryer and some cosmetic tools.
Styling food for movies can be trickier, as people may need to eat the food. In this case, sometimes carefully drawn food is photographed and the actors are provided with a substitute to eat. This also allows the crew to deal with issues such as dietary restrictions; a vegetarian may not consent to eating a slice of ham on set, but will eat a vegetarian substitute that resembles ham. Food stylists and filmmakers also have to worry about the number of takes; for example, while people may only see an actor eating a slice of cake in the finished product, an actor might need to eat multiple slices of cake to get the scene right, in which case a rich cake would be as inappropriate as the actor would quickly feel bad.
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